GOP’s demise exaggerated

Overreaction is an American pastime, and the recent elections gave plenty of opportunity to overreact.

Democrats interpret Barack Obama’s modest victory as a mandate for a shift to the left, and Republicans fret about the supposed demise of their party. Both sides should cool it.

The challenge for the GOP, in Massachusetts and nationwide, is to make the party more successful at the polls. Bay State Republicans suffered particularly painful losses: In addition to losing Scott Brown and failing to get Richard Tisei elected, four seats in the Legislature that the GOP captured in 2010 were retaken by the Democrats.

The setbacks restarted the argument on whether the party should be more moderate on social issues or aim to become more stringently conservative.

“Trying to out-Democrat the Democrats is no way to define and strengthen Massachusetts Republicanism,” said Dave Kopacz, president of the Massachusetts Republican Assembly.

“If people are given the choice between a Democrat and a faux Democrat, they’re going to vote for the Democrat,” Jared Valanzola, chairman of the Republican Town Committee in Rockland, was quoted in a Boston Globe article.

On the other hand, when asked whether the state GOP should reject the party’s national platform — which calls for a ban on abortion with no exceptions in cases of rape or incest — former Gov. Jane Swift said emphatically: “I hope they roundly reject it. We need a brand of Republicanism that allows us to elect great candidates who actually can lead the way for the national party.”

There have been suggestions that the Republican Party should “reinvent” itself, shed its image of being a pro-business enclave of white males, accept big government, support Planned Parenthood, champion gay rights, and offer amnesty to illegal immigrants. There has been talk about diversity, pitching a big tent, and even choosing a minority candidate for president in 2016. There has also been an equally strong argument for sticking to traditional conservative values and giving the voters a clear choice.

There shouldn’t be an either-or scenario. For one thing, rumors about the Republican Party’s death are highly exaggerated. The sky is not going to fall any time soon. There’s no need for radical surgery. The Republicans lost the election not because they delivered the wrong message, but because the message was delivered badly. The goal should be to refine the presentation. Disowning morons like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, whose rhetoric on rape and pregnancy shocked and alienated women voters, would be a good place to start.

Democracy cannot succeed without political balance. The devastating consequences of a one-party system based on the same ideology and leadership is painfully evident in Massachusetts, where Democrats control all aspects of public life. The Bay State debacle should discourage other states from making the same mistake.

Political campaigns live or die on perceptions. Mitt Romney hurt his cause by saying things that turned off many voters and gave the liberal media ample ammunition to fire away at him incessantly. He wasn’t wrong when he said 47 percent of the people will vote for Mr. Obama anyway because they believe they are entitled to generous government support. He was also on target after the election when he noted that the “Obama campaign was following the old playbook of giving a lot of stuff to groups that they hoped they could get to vote for them, and motivated them to go to the polls.”

Correct as those observations were, they certainly didn’t win him support.

If the Republicans hope to win elections in the future, they need to prevent manipulation of the voting system. Massive voter registration drives focused at certain segments of the population, motor-voting, early voting and individual voter assistance at the polls are all designed to help Democrats. So are efforts to prevent voter identification.

In Ohio, one of the battleground states, the polls opened three days before the Nov. 6 Election Day, allowing 106,000 people to vote early. According to campaign figures, that was almost precisely the margin by which Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney in that state.

The system Democrats use to get out the vote is another eye-opener. Here is how John Walsh, chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party — which had 20,000 volunteer campaign workers at its disposal — described the process: “You knock on a million doors before Election Day. You figure out which ones are with you and which ones are undecided, and you don’t let them forget to vote. In many places, we were hanging ‘vote today’ door hangers at 5 o’clock in the morning.

“Then, starting at 10 o’clock in the morning, huge numbers of volunteers were going out to the doors of the people who hadn’t voted in the first wave from 7 to 10, reminding them it was Election Day. If at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, if you were one of the people who had been identified as one of our supporters and you hadn’t voted by 4, at 4 o’clock you got your third visit of the day.”

While Mr. Walsh had no way of knowing it, the strategy he outlined was precisely what the Communist party-states used in Eastern Europe in the 1950s to produce nearly 100 percent voter turnout. In that system, the first knock on the door was usually sufficient.